Paris Without Her* A Review by David M. Litwack

 As we conclude Women's History Month, I wanted to share a timely review written by David M. Litwack. Hope you enjoy. Comments welcome.

PARIS WITHOUT HER...

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. . . . You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

So that it’s through language and by language that Gregory Curtis attempts to re-balance his life—after the death of his wife of thirty-five years. That is his struggle as portrayed in this moving memoir.

Paris Without Her is about rebalancing. Rebalancing one’s life. Greg is the lead actor in this drama. The drama of retraining himself to face the world. He admits as much. As if he is training himself through and by virtue of this recounting. To face the world again without her. 

So he courageously admits to what some might describe as a weakness—to being drawn over and over to the place where he and Tracy were once happiest. His recounting, this diary, pits him against the grief of his own lost past. Periods of melancholy acceptance punctuated by unexpected sightings of her. In Paris.

In fact, several times Greg faces the ghost of Tracy and the happiness they knew in Paris: “I would occasionally believe I caught site of her . . .” he writes, as when he climbed out of the metro or when a noise or flash of light had him believe “ . . . in the first instance, that it was her. It didn’t seem unusual for her to be alive and in Paris.” 

But most moving is the passage where he dances with her, or with her ghost, at a traditional open air Parisian dance, a bal musette. His arms around her—around the memory of her. Paris and the Parisian dancers swirl around him. Everyone seeming to understand what the moment must mean to him. 

In Paris, but not really without her.

A kind of spoiler alert: 

I attended high school with Greg in Kansas City. We were acquaintances but then lost track of each other for a good number of years. We separately developed our fascination with Paris and French literature. I think he was the quicker one especially in making the connection between our “mundane” adolescence in Kansas City and our later, joyous time in Paris. I myself lived a fairly long time in Paris and each day that I stepped out of my apartment and into the city’s lights was as if I’d stepped into a museum. Peopled with des santons. His perambulations took me back to those days and those places. And in reading Paris Without Her it was almost as if he was performing one of his magic tricks for me where, with his extraordinary accuracy of detail, he recalled for me the sights, sounds, and scents—of his and her Paris. 

BIO DAVID M. LITWACK, Ph.D.

David Michael, Michael David (as Mother would have it—his parents couldn’t make up their minds) grew up on the Kansas/Missouri state-line. The tension deriving from his ambiguous naming and breeding location might explain the eclectic mix of folk, international, and country selections that he offers. He’s a wanna-be songwriter noted for, among others, Rock ‘n Roll Nation, El Wahid, and Leavin’ Sara Lee…or soon will be. In the meantime he writes kids’ books; he writes espionage novels; he writes technical stuff; and he romantically proffers his love only to Donna Lu.

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